Sunday, February 5, 2017

The battle against RSV continues: use cytokines?

Research on RSV has been a hot topic since the 1960s, when the formalin-inactivated RSV vaccine was found to increase severity of disease rather than combat the common cold. The common cold continues to be deadly, causing about 60,000 hospitalizations of children under 5 and 200,000 hospitalizations (14,000 deaths) among those 65 and older yearly. Today, there is still no successful vaccine nor specific antiviral treatment for RSV, a pneumovirus. A group at the Perelman School of Medicine, including lead author Gaia Muallem, MD, has been using the Sendai virus mouse model-- a parainfluenza virus model that causes similar clinical and pathological effects as RSV-- to assess the immune response against RSV infection. They've recently identified the importance of the cytokine IL-27 in fighting the virus. In one experiment, blocking IL-27 signaling resulted in mice that suffered more severe disease and had higher mortality rates. It is thought that IL-27 mediates the level of a certain T-cell downstream pathway, Th2 responses. Excessive levels of Th2 signaling increases the severity of disease. At this point of the research, the group at Perelman has only identified IL-27 as a candidate. We are still many years of clinical studies away from seeing it in drugstores as a nasal spray.News article:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170203164334.htmOriginal Study: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006173Review on RSV vaccines:http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/CVI.00037-16-- Sharon Kam